Better Unsung

Lightwave; 2013

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There's little doubt that Delta Mirror frontman Chris Acosta believes in reincarnation. The last time we heard from his band was in 2010 with the release of their debut Machines That Listen, a downcast, glitchy ghost-pop exercise that imagined each of the album's 13 tracks as separate rooms in a hospital. Back then he went by Craig Gordon (an inside joke amongst friends), an ex-hip-hop wannabe who decided to explore more mysterious atmospheres with bandmates David Bolt and Karrie K. Now Acosta's back, using his own name to record what he considers a more personal album with Better Unsung, a lengthy, overly-ambitious piece of work that finds him in the role of a solo artist, despite enlisting the help of the Machines-era players, as well as Seattle production team Blue Sky Black Death and Anticon co-founder Alias, who also co-produced the record. Clocking in at almost an hour, Better Unsung is divided by four suites entitled "Probability and Outcome", which take their name from dialogue featured in the 1978 Warren Beatty vehicle Heaven Can Wait. The film follows a football star who is taken from earth prematurely by his guardian angel following a car accident, only to be returned in the body of a recently murdered millionaire. Better Unsung is most certainly Acosta's new millionaire disguise, pushing the ideas found on the understated Machines to convoluted, beat-oriented, maxims.

It's not such a bad idea, after all. Machines did harness something promising in the "electro shoe-goth" realm (genre description courtesy of Acosta's Twitter account), and blowing that up to the festival-ready size of an M83, Nine Inch Nails, or even a School of Seven Bells could prove pretty satisfying. But Better Unsung misses the opportunity at almost every turn, packing disorienting production, clunky lyrics, and undercooked hooks into interminably long, aimless songs that mean to either invoke chills or stimulate some kind of freeing catharsis, but instead end up bludgeoning you into an uncomfortable submission. There's no denying that Acosta has ambition, talent and-- thanks to hints of trip-hop, arena-made alt-rock, and starry-eyed shoegaze pop-- pretty good taste, but it's in the execution where he falls short. In making the leap from a somewhat insular musician to one now begging for space on a larger stage, his knack for detail and follow-through feels lost, resulting in an album too bloated to ever get its feet off the ground.

It's unlikely Acosta set out for self-sabotage, but at times it's hard to come up with an alternate excuse in the case of some of these songs. "Undeveloped Unreturned" is a nice change of pace from the preceding "Goldfish", which relies heavily on a set of played-out tropes (backwards vocals, fuzz-fucked drums). Despite its problematically schmaltzy chorus ("I’m the photo that you throw away/ I’m the phone call that you don’t take"), there's a noticeable melody that helps carry the song. But it's Acosta's nagging need to kick things into overdrive in order approximate some sort of big, effusive high that often sinks these songs. With its blown-out climax, "Undeveloped Unreturned" is sapped of its potential transportive qualities. Sadly, this is a recurring theme. "Lead Me In"'s plaintive, glassy guitars give way to a cinderblock-smashing mechanized beat drop, in which the song again aims to become some kind of celestial, lighter-waving sing-along that, instead of inspiring, feels like anesthetized. The thing is, he can get away with this kind of thing occasionally. "Goodbye Horses" is easily the best cut on the album, and despite coming off as more than a little silly, actually soars. But it's a fleeting example of Better Unsung getting things right, and suggests that on this level, Acosta just doesn't have the stuff to make this kind of thing gel in a coherent, exciting way.

In the end, Better Unsung feels kind of hollow in the face of its too-muchness. It begins to appear compulsive at times with Acosta throwing so many different things at the wall at once, ultimately sacrificing any sort of clarity of vision thanks to too many ideas and too many collaborators. It's unlikely that you wanted an industrial remix of "Goldfish", but there it is, tacked on as a hidden track at the end of an already exhaustively long record. It might be easy to suggest a little restraint is necessary here, but ballads like the yelp-y "The Bear" or the folk-like "The Happiest Endings Are the Ones That Never Come" (not true) reveal that misguided bombast is sometimes better than just plain old boring. You can't fault Acosta for pushing himself as an artist, but Better Unsung proves that this reinvention is merely just a disguise if the songs aren't there.